BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER**

WAKANDA FOREVER is a film that is hobbled by its earnestly expressed grief for actor Chadwick Boseman, the T'Challa of its predecessor.  This memorialising is welcome in the early part of the film, and beautifully handled both in the Marvel opening credits and in the way iwriter-director Ryan Coogler incorporates the death of the character into its opening act.  But as we move into the film's second half, and another character dies, we realise that this movie is leaning into grief to a level that slows the pace, brings down the mood, and creates a rather mawkish and morbid end-product.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the character of Shuri, T'Challa's younger sister and science nerd.  As written by Coogler and played by Letitia Wright, Shuri spends the entire film crying and quiet. Even the final scene is of her burning mourning clothes. I feel we could have gotten to her decision to move forward and adopt the mantle of Black Panther half way through the excessively long run-time.

The claustrophobically negative atmosphere spreads to the B-plot which sees Tenoch Huerta introduced as the character Namur. He leads an underwater kingdom of mer-people who also have access to Vibranium.  Namur is pissed off that T'Challa took the decision to tell the world about its wonders and so put his own kingdom at risk of colonial exploitation from the Americans.  

I really liked Huerta's performance and the design of this kingdom but the whole plot seemed weak as fuck.  He wants to ally with Wakanda against the imperials, but tells them if they don't ally with him he'll launch war on them.  Charming! So you end up with a massive battle between the two Vibranium super-powers with the real-world power of America left on the sidelines along with all of the American characters - Martin Freeman's CIA agent, his ex-wife - a wasted Julia Louis-Dreyfus who is now his boss, and Dominique Thorne as the MIT student who invented the vibranium detector.  The fact that the latter is squeezed out of screen-time is particularly sad, as it means the movie doesn't really explore the issue of the African-American versus African experience.

I also wonder how actual Africans feel about a film where lots of African-Americans are putting on a variety of accents and an African-American writer-director is creating a version of wise oracular Africa guided by its ancestors.  Not to mention the LGB community who must be looking at the almost embarrassed way the movie hints at a lesbian relationship between Danai Gurira's general and her sidekick played by Michaela Coel.  Somehow being so embarrassed about showing a proper kiss is even worse than not having any representation at all. 

WAKANDA FOREVER has a running time of 161 minutes and is rated PG-13. It is on global release.

BLACK PANTHER

BLACK PANTHER comes to our screens freighted with the self-appointed weight of political history. It's as if action movies starring Denzel Washington, Will Smith or Wesley Snipes never happened. It's as if nuanced black action heroes like Lando Calrissian never happened.  This, we are told, is a watershed moment where a major franchise blockbuster not only stars a single male action hero, but a whole cast full of amazing black male and female talent.  I can't but agree - there's a qualitative leap when you have an entire film full of black actors, with African accents, with most of the action set in Africa.  This is all to the good, and it's great to see black representation go to that next stage, but I can't help but feel that that tide of goodwill toward the film - goodwill that I too shared - has clouded critical attitudes toward it.  I am hugely excited that such a project has come to our screens, but I think it would be patronising not to review it critically.  I sense in a lot of the excitement in the tweets since its preview screenings began, at best conflation between excitement that the project exists vs its content - and at worst virtue signalling.  Because let's be clear, this is an entirely disposable occasionally very funny, but often rather dull and overly complicated film.  And its titular character, as portrayed by Chadwick Boseman (GET ON UP), is the least interesting thing about it.

The story has so many strands it's hard to know where to begin.  We have a thinly veiled version of Rwanda blessed with a rare metal called Vibranium which gives their king, Black Panther, extra-ordinary power, and the country futuristic technology.  The film takes from this premise the following concern:  

1) Should this tech be hidden to prevent its exploitation by others;

2) Shared with the world for good;

3) Or be used to get revenge and achieve domination over the rest of the world? 

Broadly speaking, Black Panther starts off believing the first, and this story is his coming of age story, a classical Greek tale of a son learning to confront his father's assumptions and become his own man.  His wariness is made credible by the existence of a nasty white South African thief called Ulysses Klaue, who's being chased down by a CIA agent called Everett Ross.   By contrast, and despite seeing all this, Black Panther's little sister Shuri, who is a tech genius, believes the tech should be shared, tradition thrown off, and modernity embraced.  Finally, Black Panther and Shuri have a cousin called Erik Killmonger, who as his name suggest with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, is angry at being rejected by his family, the death of his father, and wants to overthrow Black Panther and use the Vibranium for evil.

Where the film works well is in its opening 45 minutes.  The prologue nicely sets up some of the mythology and origins of the Black Panther/T'Challa, and the emotional ties between father, uncle and son as well as the Panther and his love interest. The action is fast paced, we are introduced to the the man we think is the antagonist, and also the character who truly turns out to be the real threat.  And we get the surprise of two of the least well known members of the cast - Letitia Wright and Dalai Gurira - being by far the most charismatic and funny.  The problem is that after that we get a middle section that is extremely bogged down in all the intricacies of the cumbersome plot. And a final section that is your typical Marvel action set-piece with bad CGI.  Someone in the screening I attended, who evidently loved the film, shouted "Rewind!" as the credits rolled, and I just wanted to shout back "Edit!"  There's a decent 100 minute action movie struggling inside this over-blown 134 minute running time.

The problems for the film are worse than just a baggy script though. Chadwick Boseman is a charisma-less lead. Perhaps the most charisma-less lead since Henry Cavill's Superman.  And he plays the role not just with a South African accent, but with an almost pastiche version of a Nelson Mandela impression.  His entire acting range seems to be to bite his lip, and look concerned. He's acted off the screen by Daniel Kaluuya (GET OUT) as W'Kabi, his fellow Wakandan, not to mention Michael B Jordan (CREED) as his troubled cousin Killmonger.  And that's before we even get to the women. Lupita N'yongo is anonymous as the love interest - an early attempt to rescue Boko Haram kidnapped women makes you think she's gonna be feisty, but no, she really is just there to look adoring and be supportive. And so she in turn is acted off the screen by Letitia Wright's smart, irreverent Shuri, and by the Black Panther's General Okoye (Danai Gurira). And to be honest - and I'm not gonna be popular for saying this, the entire bunch of them are outclassed by Andy Serkis cameo as the evil Klaue, and he seemed to be having far more fun on screen than I did in the cinema. 

The tragedy of this film is that having waited so long for a black-led ensemble action movie the result is so anodyne. Take a Bond-like villain here, a character that's like Q, your typical Marvel action scenes and tech, an indifferent score and special effects.... And then for no reason at all, chuck in a cataphract rhino and a cliche of tribal strife. The result is a film that isn't half as good as BLADE and middling by the standards of the MCU.

BLACK PANTHER has a running time of 134 minutes and is rated 12A for moderate violence, injury detail and a rude gesture. It goes on global release on Wednesday 14th February. 

THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES

THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES picks up in media res, with the wicked dragon Smaug laying waste to the good fisherfolk of Laketown, having been usurped of his treasure by the dwarf-king Thorin Oakenshield and his fellowship of adventurers.   In the pre-credit sequence our erstwhile hero, Bard, famously shoots the dragon in his one vulnerable spot: a spectacular CGI battle of epic scope that we have come to almost take for granted in Peter Jackson's interpretations of Tolkien's oeuvre.  But as we enter the main body of this two hour movie, we realise that Smaug casts a long shadow, and that his "dragon sickness" has corrupted King Thorin, who sits brooding jealously over his treasure, in paranoid search for the Arkenstone.  This corruption belittles Thorin, who looks on indifferent as a great battle wages outside the walls of The Lonely Mountain.  The Laketown men, led by Bard have come for their share in the treasure, as has an Elven army led by Thranduil.  They face Thorin's kinsman, led by Dain, and all in turn must put aside their petty rivalries and unite against the armies of Orcs (goblins in the books) until a fifth army makes a late in the day appearance.  The story of the movie is thus the blow by blow story of this battle, but really it's the story of Thorin throwing off the corruption of the treasure and becoming a king worthy of the name. And in the background, as Peter Jackson broadens his scope from The Hobbit, we see the more important battle, as Galadriel banishes proto-Sauron into Mordor, and an already tricksy Saruman prevents Elrond from warning the men of Gondor or going immediately to vanquish him there.  

THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG - he's not even the centre of his own poster, goddamit!

So, I'm a great fan of Tolkien, going so far as to podcast in great detail on Lord of the Rings (links here) and despite the changes, I really loved Peter Jackson's movies.  By contrast, I found the first HOBBIT film dull and tonally uneven - never quite knowing whether it wanted to be the whimsical children's book or an altogether darker, more complex prequel to LOTR, using material from the Silmarillion and Appendices.  The result was a movie that alternated between troll-ish buffoonery and deep dark elvish foreboding, and never quite sat right with me. So I went into its sequel, the middle film of the trilogy, with low expectations.

But maybe I'm getting ahead of myself? And I'm sure there are lots of people who will watch these films without having read the book - and, indeed, if you didn't see the first HOBBIT film, Jackson has provided a handy little catch-up prologue at the start of this one.  

Bilbo Baggins is a small hobbit living in a high fantasy world of trolls, elves, dwarves and dragons.  He's taken along on an adventure by thirteen dwarves, led by the mighty Thorin Oakenshield, to find a dragon called Smaug and to trick him into giving up the Arkenstone - a jewel which will allow Thorin to reclaim the kingdom that Smaug pillaged.  When we meet the band of travellers in this instalment, they run into a giant wolf-warg called Beorn, as well as some giant spiders, before finding themselves imprisoned by the elf-king Thranduil, his son Legolas, and a comely female Elf called Tauriel. They escape though, and find themselves in a desolate Laketown, hiding with a smuggler called Bard, before entering the Lonely Mountain itself, to face off with the dragon, Smaug.  

As movies go, this one has its fare share of CGI heavy adventure sequences - some of which will surely delight children.  But I found it hard to care about any of the characters. If the hero is Bilbo, as the title suggests, why does he sort of disappear from view for the middle section of the film? (I mean, he doesn't even get centre stage in his own poster!) Are we meant to care about Thorin - he's heroic but also arrogant and cold.  And what are we meant to make of Tauriel, a newly invented character meant to redress Tolkien's lack of women?  Well, maybe I'd be able to take this more seriously if the writers had made her a genuinely independent kick-ass warrior, rather than foisting her into the middle of an awkward love triangle between Legolas and Kili, a dwarf! And are the actors meant to be playing it straight - angst-ridden men on the verge of war (Thorin, Bard) - or camping it up (Thranduil, the Master of Laketown)? Lee Pace's Thranduil is camper than Alan Cumming as Emcee.  And if the pacing is less stretched than the first film, there are still twenty minute sections of this one that left me bored.

That said, when this second movie works, it really works!  I loved everything to do with Martin Freeman's Hobbit and Benedict Cumberbatch's Smaug, even if Smaug does commit that fatal Bond villain error of not killing his enemy immediately. I loved Evangeline Lilly's Tauriel when she was arguing with Lee Pace's Thranduil about taking a less insular stance toward the evil in the forest.  And I loved the idea of building out Bard's character so that we actually care about him when we get to the fateful events of the next instalment.

Still, I can't help but think that this flick would've been better of as two films at most, or at best, as a miniseries.  Or perhaps it's a question of expectations? Instead of calling these films "The Hobbit" maybe Jackson should've called them genuine prequels to Lord of the Rings. That way, he wouldn't have been hamstrung by the more childish elements - tricking trolls and escaping in wine barrels - and could've steeped himself in the rise of Sauron to his heart's delight? 

THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG has a running time of 161 minutes and is rated PG-13 in the USA and 12A in the UK for moderate violence and threat. 

THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG is on release pretty much everywhere except Vietnam, where it opens on January 3rd; China, where it opens on February 8th; and Japan, where it opens on February 28th.

THE WORLD'S END

So here's the latest podcast review, covering the new film from the team that brought you the hilariously funny SHAUN OF THE DEAD and HOT FUZZ.  Where the team stick to that original premise of schlubby suburban Brits tackling ludicrous otherworldly scenarios, the movie retains its laugh out loud brilliance. But, sad to say, director Edgar Wright has brought some of his ueber-stylised, comic-book action over from SCOTT PILGRIM and it's just tedious.  Still, despite that CGI, over-choreographed excess, when this film works, boy does it work, and it's definitely worth checking out. 

The film has a running time of 109 minutes and has been rated R in the USA and 15 in the UK for strong language and strong sex references.

THE WORLD'S END opens on July 18th in New Zealand; on July 19th in the UK and Ireland; on July 31st in Iceland; on August 1st in Australia; on August 23rd in the USA; on August 28th in France; on September 5th in Russia; on September 12th in Germany and Singapore; in the Netherlands on September 19th; on September 26th in Italy; on September 27th in Sweden; on October 3rd in Denmark;  on October 4th in Finland; on October 16th in Belgium; on October 18th in Norway; and on October 25th in Brazil. 

THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY 3D HFR

He looks pretty bored too.

I came to THE HOBBIT as a fan of Peter Jackson's THE LORD OF THE RINGS, and a fan of fantasy in general.  But even the most ardent fan must admit that when read in retrospect, JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit is an enjoyable but slight work.  It is, after all, a short-ish children's story about a group of dwarves  going off to battle a dragon who has stolen their gold.  On the way they meet goblins and trolls and the adventures largely consist of riddles and tricks rather than epic battles. In fact, even though it later became the stuff of epic-world building, The Hobbit isn't epic. It's small and intimate and cracks along at a rapid pace.

I was, then, rather worried about Peter Jackson's decision to "open up" the novel with lots of back story to THE LORD OF THE RINGS.  It seemed to me that the tightly written book with its rambunctious tone wouldn't survive having the dark, brooding, heavy backstory of Middle Earth being hung from its slender frame.  And I was right.  Watching THE HOBBIT is like watching a childhood friend being excruciatingly slowly stretched on a wrack until his bones snap.

Of its three hour run time, the first forty-five minutes are just prologue.  Old Bilbo Baggins (Ian Holm) starts to write his story for Frodo (Elijah Wood) on the eve of his final birthday party in Bag End.  All this creates moments of recognition from THE LORD OF THE RINGS that are fun for the superfans, but still we are frustrated that the story isn't moving.  Indeed, it's ironic that even when Bilbo begins, he doesn't start with the dwarves coming to collect him for their quest, but rather with their own backstory.  In other words, we have back story within back story(!): the tale of how Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), the dwarf Prince, witnessed his granfather's mountain empire taken over by Smaug The Dragon, and was betrayed by the elf Prince Thranduil (Lee Pace.)

Sixty years earlier and the dwarves finally make it to young Bilbo (Martin Freeman) and the story can begin.  But over the remaining two hours, we are in very tedious and tonally inconsistent territory - with the childish japes among the trolls interspersed with earnest conversations at Rivendell with Elrond (Hugo Weaving), Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) and Saruman (Christopher Lee.)   At the end of it, the dwarves just about make it to the mountain where the real story can begin - Bilbo's fateful meeting with Gollum, and most important of all, his decision to spare Gollum's life.  Even then, the movie doesn't end but creates a final act involving Orcs and Eagles.  

The result is a film that feels like one damn Orc chase after an other. Unlike THE LORD OF THE RINGS, there is no natural build-up to major battle scene so everything lacks tension.  The humorous passages are far too few, and the earnest foreshadowing of LORD OF THE RINGS feels too much like a faint echo of a far greater work. In fact, to my mind, the only things that save this film are the pivotal scene between a masterful Andy Serkis' Gollum and Bilbo, and the brilliantly funny turn by Sylvestor McCoy as the mushroom-eating, super-rabbit chauffered wizard Radogast The Brown.  The rest of the film is basically just arse-numbingly dull.

A quick technical word for the cinema-enthusiasts. I watched the film in 3D which was definitely a plus as a lot of the scenes (butterflies, eagles, rabbits) really suited it. As for the High Frame Rate (filming at 48 frames per second rather than 24 frames per second), it's a mixed bag.  In scenes that were interior or night-time, with subdued lighting, the clarity and brightness afforded by shooting at 48 FPS offset the typical murkiness that comes with wearing 3D glasses. But in daytime scenes in full sunshine, the 48 FPS footage was so bright that it looked like cheap TV and the make-up and special-effects were all too obvious. 

THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY is on global release. 

THE PIRATES! BAND OF MISFITS aka THE PIRATES! IN AN ADVENTURE WITH SCIENTISTS

I love this movie!  Parents with small kids should go see it!  Adults without kids should go see it!  It has wit, charm, intelligence, pirates, the Elephant Man, a dodo, swashbuckling, ham-eating, Brian Blessed, and all in an action-packed, emotionally satisfying 85 minutes.  Honestly,  this is about as good as cinematic entertainment gets!  Kudos to Aardman Studios (home of Wallace and Gromit) for brilliantly mixing hand-made stop-motion animation and CGI backdrops, and achieving a level of visual wit that demands repeated viewings. Kudos to director Peter Lord of Morph fame, for delicately balancing comedy and action.  Kudos to all the voice artists, but particularly Hugh Grant as Pirate Captain - a rare chance to see his comedy chops.  But most of all, kudos to Gideon Defoe, who wrote the screenplay based on his own novels. I really hope Aardman follow the ADVENTURE WITH SCIENTISTS!* with the rest of the series.

In this instalment, we meet Pirate Captain and his dead-pan named crew (Number Two, Albino Pirate, Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate...).  He's a loveable old cove, but pretty hapless and destined to lose the Pirate of the Year award unless he can pull off a massive coup. His chance arrives when he mistakenly holds up Charles Darwin's Beagle, and Darwin (David Tennant) tells him that his beloved parrot, Polly, is in fact a Dodo!  There follows a trip to London to display Polly at the Royal Academy, thereby winning some booty, and an adventure against a sword-wielding Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton) who hates, hates, HATES pirates!

There's so much to love here.  The richly decorated backdrops are full of visual jokes.  But in the foreground, I loved the whole Brian Blessed worship.  I loved the idea of Darwin's butler being a trained monkey with comedy flash-cards.  I loved the idea of Queen Victoria as a murdering ninja.  Most of all, I just loved Hugh Grant in his best performance since ABOUT A BOY.

This is hands down my movie of the year to date.

THE PIRATES! is on release in the UK, Ireland, Belgium, France, Denmark, Germany, Finland, Lithuania, Norway, Sweden, Italy, Australia, Kuwait, New Zealand, Serbia and Estonia. It opens on April 12th in Greece; on April 20th in Argentina, Colombia and Romania; on April 27th in the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Canada, India and the USA; on May 11th in Brazil; on May 17th in Hungary; on June 7th in Serbia; on July 20th in Spain; on July 26th in Hong Kong; on August 9th in Israel; and on August 30th in Singapore.

*I'm not sure why the film has been retitled for the US market unless the marketing department think the US has become a crypto-theocracy in which even the mention of science is going to alienate audiences?

NATIVITY! - Lo-fi, irritating, but pulls it back at the end

NATIVITY! is a low-rent, shamelessly schmaltzy family film directed by Debbie Isitt, of whose previous film, CONFETTI, I wrote "it may be 'sweet' on occasion, but it fails in its central mission to make us laugh". I could say exactly the same thing about NATIVITY! It's a poorly written film that hangs upon a ludicrous premise: loser primary school teacher (Martin Freeman) tells a white lie that his Hollywood producer ex (Ashley Jensen) is coming back to town to see the school nativity play. The "town" of Coventry gets wind of this and the hype grows so large that the hapless teacher is forced to fly to LA to persuade his ex gf to really show up, before an all-singing, all-dancing, cutesy finale. The acting is as notable as one might imagine given the absurd script, with the exception of a rather bizarre performance from Marc Wootton as a teaching assistant. Production values are similarly lo-fi. Directorial choices are ham-fisted. Why go to the trouble of setting up a visual gag wherein a whole street of houses is decked out in Christmas lights with the exception of the house of the grinch-like school-teacher, if not to pull back and actually show the whole street? And so it goes on. Basically, this film is rather mechanical, poorly-made, and utterly forgettable. The only redeeming feature is the final segment in which we see the kids put on the actual nativity play. After all, it takes a really mean critic to actively decry the efforts of a bunch of six-year olds giving it all they've got.

NATIVITY! is on release in the UK.

THE GOOD NIGHT veers off track

THE GOOD NIGHT is a rather straightforward movie about lucid dreaming and comes off as indebted, but deeply inferior, to THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP. Martin Freeman (THE OFFICE) plays a faded Britpop star frustrated with his new career writing derivative commercial music. He's also frustrated with his deeply irritating girlfriend (Gwyneth Paltrow) and fantasises about a beautiful woman played by Penelope Cruz. Mocked by his amoral best friend (Simon Pegg), our hero turns to a variety of new-age kooks for techniques to sustain and even control his dreams. Finally, he actually meets a girl who looks just like the object of his fantasies.

The movie has some little comedic gems - Simon Pegg is on brilliant form and Britpop legend Jarvis Cocker is unnervingly convincing as a talking-head. But overall, THE GOOD NIGHT is a mess. The look of the film is bizarre - it's meant to be set in New York but is transparently set in London. The acting is mixed, with Danny de Vito and Michael Gambon wasted, and apparently unmotivated, in smaller roles. But most of all the script, from writer-director Jake Paltrow, veers off track. The movie starts of a romantic-comedy with an odd-ball streak, but ends up feeling like an Almodovar rip-off. Paltrow simply doesn't have the stones to handle the severe material he introduces.

THE GOOD NIGHT played Sundance 2007 and went on release in Russia, Greece, the USA and Israel in 2007. It was relased in 2008 in the UK and South Korea and is now available on DVD.

Crimes Against Cinema 3: THE GOOD NIGHT

Debutant writer-director Jake Paltrow pisses on the memory of the Ealing Comedies from a great height with his alleged rom-com, THE GOOD NIGHT. Paltrow audaciously chews up great movies like VANILLA SKY and THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP and spits out an uneven, mis-judged movie filled with insufficiently drawn characters. Martin Freeman of THE OFFICE fame does his usual schtick as a disenchanted middle-aged sell out. In this instance, he's bored by his long-time squeeze (Gwyneth Paltrow) and fantasising about a perfect women in his dreams (Penelope Cruz.) Before you get all excited, the movie takes a left turn at WEIRD SCIENCE and ends up in dulls-ville. Freeman meets the women who inspired his sub-conscious fantasies and, guess what, she's not so perfect in reality. Gee whiz, who knew?! And as for Simon Pegg's supporting role, after RUN FATBOY RUN and BIG NOTHING, he needs to go and stand in the corner and think very carefully about what he's done.

THE GOOD NIGHT played Sundance 2007 and opened in Russia, Greece, the US and Israel in 2007. It is currently on release in the UK and opens next weekend in South Korea.

THE ALL TOGETHER shite

Shite comedy from debut writer-director Gavin Claxton. Stars Martin "The Office" Freeman as exactly the same character he always plays - the bewildered straight guy amidst a sea of kooks. He's out for the day producing shite TV for people with no sense of humour (oh, the irony!) Meanwhile, his hapless house-mate, Bob, has randomly let in a couple of gangsters along with the estate agents. Corey Johnson plays Mr Gaspardi like he's spoofing Liotta, badly. Although, in fairness, his entire role consists of emptying his bowels while whistling The Star Spangled Banner. Danny Dyer sinks even further into self-parody as his foul-mouthed spivvy side-kick, Dennis. The whole thing is weak beyond belief, with the exception of Velibor Topic, who plays the housemate with genuine comic timing.

After STRAIGHTHEADS, OUTLAW, THE GREAT ECSTASY OF ROBERT CARMICHAEL and this piss-poor alleged comedy, one wonders what further cinematic crime Danny Dyer will be inflicting upon the British public this year. Frankly, his only hope for career rehab is persuading someone to make SEVERANCE 2.

THE ALL TOGETHER is on release in the UK, god help us.

HOT FUZZ makes SHAUN OF THE DEAD look pants

From the team that brought you break-out comedy and horror spoof SHAUN OF THE DEAD comes a movie so funny that hysterical cameos by Martin Freeman, Bill Bailey and Steve Coogan are BY FAR not the funniest things about it. Yes, yes, yes. Finally, we have a genuinely laugh-out loud comedy that contains a clever but never up-its-own-arse pastiche of the cop thriller genre. Simon Pegg returns as the straight man around which all manner of weird shit happens in deceptively "normal" British surroundings. This time, he plays a super-dedicated cop called Nicholas Angel. Angel is a man after my own heart - a genuine Londoner - and he's being pushed out to the country (yikes!) so that his colleagues can stop looking so bad. Angel hooks up with a dopey side-kick local copper called Danny who dreams of packing heat and busting drug-lords, BAD BOYS II stylee. Sadly, the village of Sandford has the lowest crime-rate in Britain. A crime-rate almost suspciously low. Hehehe. Cue lots of creepy "local" goings-on; genuinely witty dialogue; brilliantly observed gags at the expense of town verus country rivalry; and the kind of intelligent pastiche that the writers of EPIC MOVIE should bloody well aspire too. I can't say more because it'll just come out like a bunch of repetitive sycophantic drivel. Basically, this movie is funny. If you want to be amused, go and see it.

HOT FUZZ is on release in the UK. It opens in Spain on March 9th, in Argentina, Australia and Russia on March 15th and in the Netherlands on April 5th. It opens in Sweden and the US on April 13th and Germany on June 14th.

BREAKING AND ENTERING - Minghella bites off more than he can chew

Anthony Minghella's new film, BREAKING AND ENTERING is not quite up to the grand subjects and aspirations it sets itself, but is a compelling relationship drama nonetheless. That drama is set resolutely in London - the London of immigrant crime, prostitutes and that dirty of dirty words, "regeneration". And Minghella must be praised for rendering the back alleys of London's King Cross with as much menace as the back alleys of Venice in THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY. The score is also brilliantly judged.

In this world, Jude Law plays an architect called Will whose long-time partner is a beautiful Swedish woman (Robin Wright Penn). The relationship is crumbling because she cannot quite trust Will to look after her autistic daughter and resents his feelings of neglect. Will works at an architecture firm in Kings Cross whose computers keep being nicked. He follows one of the thieves - a young Bosnian kid - and ends up seducing his mother, played by Juliette Binoche. He does not tell her he knows her son is a thief.

Where this movie works is in its depiction of complex modern relationships - long-term partners with step-children. Jude Law is fine but he is acted off the screen by Robin Wright Penn and Juliette Binoche. The movie also has a deep vein of deadpan humour, supplied by Martin Freeman in a cameo re-run of his character in THE OFFICE. Better still, Vera Farmiga - who I hated in THE DEPARTED - is astoundingly good and wickedly funny in her role as a prostitute. She really elevates the movie and it is a shame when her character drops out of focus.

But the movie fails almost everywhere else. Accents aside, the immigrant story does not feel anchored in fact and minutely observed cultural details. The love story between the white architect and the african cleaner is picked up and tossed aside - as if Minghella's knows this is an interesting contemporary story but has neither the time nor the familiarity with the subject matter to flesh it out. The entire final 40 minutes is a mess - and badly needs a script doctor. The characters do things that seem contrary to their personalities - and the denouement seems - SPOILER ALERT - cobbled together in order to give closure to the protagonist with not a care for the treatment of Binoche's character. This makes the final scene of happy families in the architecture firm stick in the throat.

Finally, what we have is a relationship drama that sort of works surrounded and obscured by bigger social issues that are never convincingly portrayed. If you want a document of social life in London - check out DIRTY PRETTY THINGS - a far better movie all round.

BREAKING AND ENTERING played Toronto and London 2006. It opens in the UK on November 10th and in the US on December 8th. It opens in Australia, Denmark, Belgium, France, Spain, Argentina, the Netherlands, Germany and Brazil in January 2007. It opens in Italy in March 2007.

CONFETTI - Truly a Wasted Talent Production

CONFETTI smacks of a shameless cash-in on the back of the recent success of TV mockumentaries such as The Office and Nighty Night, and the more long-lived hackneyed schmaltz purveyed by Richard Curtis. This mish-mash of genres should be clear from the following short description of the "concept" of the film: a fictional British wedding magazine called Confetti is running a competition for its readers. Three short-listed couples are competing to stage the most original weddings they can imagine, followed by the film-crew that is producing this film. We get to see the run-up to the wedding day, the three weddings themselves and the aftermath of the contest.

Where the movie gets it right is in showing the hoop-la that surrounds a big wedding, and the way in which a couple can be forced into doing all sorts of stuff that they don't want to do. And, thanks to the lovely acting, especially from Martin Freeman and Stephen Mangan, I did find myself rooting for all the couples and being strangely moved by the wedding ceremonies themselves. In other words, the Richard Curtiss fans probably won't be too disappointed.

However, if CONFETTI succeeds in being "sweet" it fails in its mission to make us laugh. The main problem is that the improvised script is distinctly short on laughs - whether subtle and observational or just plain slapstick. It is not hard to see where the film-makers have gone wrong. Why oh why dispense with a scriptwriter? Just because an actor can act well does not mean he can write his own material too. Ricky Gervais and Larry David are the exceptions, not the rule.

Another big fat problem is that the film completely fails as a mockumentary along the lines of This is Spinal Tap or The Office. These films work because the film-makers successfully create the illusion that they are genuinely photographing something that is actually happening. How do they do this? First, they use only the camera angles and shooting styles that would be available to a documentary crew. In The Office this is done to great effect - we are forever looking through windows, or around corners to catch characters doing things they would rather not see on tape. Most obviously, in the case of The Office, we never follow the characters home, or see them DELIBERATELY reveal a side of themselves that they would choose to keep hidden. The humour derives from the unconscious and unintended revelations of insecurity or arrogance. But in CONFETTI, the film-makers break all these rules again and again. So while we do have the straight-to-camera interviews and the hand-held camera observational shots, we also have a bunch of footage that couldn't possibly have been filmed had this been a real documentary. The most obvious error is including a lot of intimate scenes between various couples in their respective bedrooms. But we also get a lot of straightforwardly filmed shots that should have been shot in a voyeuristic, sneaky manner.

Like I said, CONFETTI may be "sweet" on occasion, but it fails in its central mission to make us laugh. With the benefit of hindsight, the only mild humour is derived from one of the opening credits, which informs us that Confetti is A Wasted Talent Production. Never a truer word said. Indeed, there is a sort of achievement in casting Martin Freeman, Jimmy Carr, Julia Davis and Alison Steadman in a film that DOESN'T make us laugh. However, it is not the kind of achievement you want to spend ten squid on seeing.

CONFETTI is on general release in the UK. It hits Australia with a damp thud on June 22nd 2006, squelches into Germany on September 7th 2006 and finally thumbs its nose at France on October 11th.